Altair to invest $5 mn in 2 yrs

Altair Engineering, the Michigan-based product design and technology company, plans to invest around $5 million in the next two years to ramp up its Indian operations.

The company's Indian subsidiary Altair Engineering India, which has grown from just a 15-member team in 2002 to around 220 at present, will double its headcount over the next one year.

"We will soon recruit around 280 people for our product development centre in Bangalore in the next eight months to one year, apart from ramping up the team size in Pune and Delhi," Pavan Kumar, managing director, Asean, Altair Engineering, told Business Standard.

He said that to accommodate a bigger team, the company would soon move to a bigger facility off the Outer Ring Road area in the city. "We have bought a space of around 50,000 sft at the Prestige Technology Park, where we will move in shortly," he added.

Altair, a privately-held company, has around 1,000 people working at its product development centres in the US, Italy, Germany and Sweden apart from Bangalore in India. The Bangalore product development centre is the largest one for the company, next only to the US.

Kumar said that the company had adopted an aggressive hiring strategy. "We have started campus hiring and the first batch of 15 people from IITs were recruited last month, and are expected to join in July this year," he added.

The company plans to recruit at least 45 engineers from IITs through campus recruitment in the next one year, he said.

Apart from organic growth, the company is also looking at acquiring 'technology companies in India and abroad'.

"Although traditionally we stayed away from inorganic growth, we are open to acquisitions in the solver space. But these will be driven more by technology than market size, as we want to be a technology company," said Kumar.

Altair has announced the version 8.0 of its HyperWorks software suite. HyperWorks is an advanced suite for computer-aided engineering (CAE) software applications that help users in achieving efficient product design in a short time.

"We have expanded the capacity while making it easier to design the product in the latest version," said Michael Arnold, technology strategist, HyperWorks, Altair Engineering.

According to Rajneesh Sindhe, director (marketing), Altair Engineering India, the CAE market in India is currently around $16 million and is growing by 30-40 per cent annually. "Altair Engineering India is growing much ahead of the market at 50 per cent year-on-year basis and currently contributes around seven per cent of the company's annual revenue," Sindhe said.

He said that going forward, the domestic demand in defence, aviation, automotive and traditional heavy manufacturing industry would propel the growth of the company in India.

At present, Altair has over 250 customers in India that includes Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra & Mahindra, Maruti, L&T and DRDO Labs.

Recently, the company said it was reorganising its European and Asia/Pacific operations to streamline the international customer support and marketing efforts.

As part of this, it has announced opening of two trans-national support and marketing organisations to be based out of Boeblingen in Germany and Bangalore in India.

Nelson Dias, former managing director of Altair India, has now assumed the responsibility for Asia/Pacific operations of the organisation as executive vice-president.

All offices of Altair Engineering India will now be a part of the trans-national support and marketing organisation in India.